If culture takes the idea of Europe seriously

Between Rome and Paris, cultural cooperation is trying to change nature: no longer an exchange of prestige, but a strategic infrastructure. Three years after the Quirinal Treaty came into force and close to 9 May, Europe Day, the question is no longer whether the Italia-France axis exists, but whether it finally wants to give itself an adult cultural form. The round table on 13 May at Palazzo Farnese - European Cultural Diplomacy in Times of Conflict - presented by Ambassador Anne-Marie Descôtes, with Federica Olivares, Francesco Rutelli, Gilles Pécout and conducted by Elisa Anzaldo, forces a more uncomfortable question: when Italia and France talk about culture, are they celebrating their remote past or trying to build a piece of the European future? For far too long, cultural cooperation between the two countries has been nourished by a symbolic rent as rich as it is reassuring: exhibitions, solemn anniversaries, cross-seasons, mutual tributes. All magnificent, between canapés and toasts. But in a Europe traversed by war, the pressure of nationalism, democratic fragility and technological transformation, it is no longer enough. Culture either goes back to being infrastructure, or is reduced to ceremonial. This is why Pécout's presence matters, and matters a great deal. Not only because he presides over the Bibliothèque nationale de France, but because history, institution and political vision meet in him. A historian of Italy, co-editor of the Treaty of the Quirinal, he belongs to a tradition that still seems natural in France and surprising in Italia: the one whereby a historian can be not an ornament of public discourse, but a state resource.

Contemporary conflicts are not only about territories, security and energy, but memories, narratives, images of civilisations, symbolic legitimations. Hollywood, in the short century, was not only an entertainment industry, but a machine of symbolic universalisation. Today, the same game is being played, this time by us, through heritage, design, fashion, audiovisual, gastronomy. The repas gastronomique recently recognised by Unesco is not a sum of dishes but a declaration of civilisation. In this field, the Italia-France axis has unparalleled capital. The Treaty of the Quirinale already offers a more ambitious political basis than one might say: youth mobility, heritage protection, collaboration in the cultural and creative industries. It is, at least on paper, an operational grammar of cultural diplomacy. The question is whether Italia and France really want to use it, or prefer to keep it framed.

France has a solid capacity to transform culture and general interest into public architecture. Italia is richer in widespread fabric, embodied creativity, polycentric heritage; but often weaker when it comes to giving strategic continuity to this wealth. Cooperation between the two countries only makes sense if culture stops being a showcase: if it remains a subordinate sector, it produces bureaucracy, not identity. What is needed is something lighter and more permanent at the same time: a binational observatory capable of choosing two or three strategic supply chains each year; cross-residencies for curators, translators, artisans, publishers, designers; a common commission to produce exportable forms - exhibitions, podcasts, documentaries, atlases of savoir-faire. And a public index measuring not events, but what remains. Not how many vernissages, but how many ideas survive the summer.

The real leap concerns three tasks that sound simple: risk, narrative, institution. Risk, that is, the ability to transform the differences between the two countries into a productive laboratory, and to bet on cultural diversity - a principle enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty - against the temptation of the mainstream. Narration, i.e. the ability to speak also outside Rome and Paris - in the Mediterranean, in Africa, in the Americas, even in the deep provinces of Italia and France. Institution, i.e. new and light presidia: a European school of applied cultural diplomacy, a commissioning fund for the imaginaries of the continent, a translation agency. A chain of authors and formats should be added to this architecture: a small Italian-French library of the European present, an audiovisual platform on the updated model of ARTE for documentaries and cinema of the real, a joint fund for authors and podcast-makers, a festival of material culture between food and wine, design, craftsmanship. It is not enough to make masterpieces travel: forms, languages, ideas must be made to travel. The Italia-France alliance has all the elements to become a European laboratory of cultural diplomacy: heritage, history, symbolic density, even the political framework. What it lacks is the courage to treat culture not as a prestige supplement, but as a policy of the possible. And the possible, this time, takes the form of a continent that stops telling itself and goes back to building itself.